Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I just got this cookbook 2 days ago and I have made 2 recipes. If I never found another recipe in it, it would STILL be worth what I paid. BOTH my loaves of bread turned out FANTASTIC!!! I have been gluten free for 14 months now, and I have baked MANY a loaf of bread. NONE, not ONE, has turned out as perfect as the 2 I just made. Yesterday I made the Cinnamon Raisin Bread. Today I made the Grandmother's Brown Bread. I have not ONE negative thing to say about either loaf of bread. They are PERFECT!! I want to tell you what I used and what I did. For one thing, I do not own, nor do I intend to own, a zojirushi-whatever it's called bread machine!! The machine I have is a Sunbeam model 5891. This machine is PERFECTLY adequate to handle these loaves of bread. I do NOT agree that you need to fork out hundreds of dollars on some expensive bread machine. Both recipes that I made required a dough cycle, and a bake cycle. My machine has both. I put in the wet ingredients, turned on the dough cycle, added the dry, helped it get all the crumbs from the corners with a rubber spatula within 2 minutes as directed, closed the lid, let the machine finish mixing, removed the paddle, smoothed the top as directed, let the dough cycle finish, turned it on to bake, took it's temp when done, assured it was at 200 degrees and removed from pan immediately. NO SINKING!!! NO FUNKY AIR POCKETS!! NO DENSE HEAVY SHRIVELED LOAF!! It's GORGEOUS!!! Now, the one other change I made is, most if not all the recipes call for instant bread machine yeast. I buy my yeast in bulk at Costco. It's regular yeast. I'm not about to go out and purchase MORE yeast, so, what I did was whatever water was called for in the recipe, I used WARM water, I added my yeast to the water (increasing to 2 tsp when recipes called for 1 1/2), and put in 1 tsp sugar. I let this bubble while I added the remaining wet ingredients. Then, I poured in my yeast mixture. The recipes in the book call for adding instant yeast to the DRY ingredients. So, basically all I did was activate my yeast first, by adding it to the water (which I warmed) with a teaspoon of sugar, and increasing slightly to make up for the fact that mine wasn't instant. VOILA! The bread is tall, the bread is light, the bread is beautiful. I am SO happy about these 2 loaves of bread, I cannot contain my excitement. I can't wait to try more recipes!! I will try to update after I do! Thank you SOOOOOO much for this book!!! Bread baking has never been easier for me and I was a HUGE bread baker before getting Celiac disease. UPDATE!! After having a baby and moving twice, I hadn't been doing a lot of baking and was buying Rudi's bread at Costco for a while. Now I am BACK AT IT! And I have my book out again too. I make the Grandma's Brown Bread on p. 30 all the time, subbing flax meal for the rice bran. It turns out great every time in my Sunbeam. I also recently made the cornbread on page 102, adding bacon and corn as suggested. It was delicious, and rose up to be like a regular slice of bread. My boys and I made the breadsticks on page 146, and ate the entire batch immediately! We will be doubling that recipe next time, and it was fun to make! I also just made the Date Nut Loaf on page 204. It is delicous if you want a mildy sweet and nutty bread! Overall, I still LOVE this cookbook and it is the only one I use to bake bread. My Sunbeam bread machine is still working perfectly for these recipes as well!